Bergman Design House Turns a London Apartment Into a Living Archive

Decoranytime

An international family of four, described simply as collectors, commissioned Bergman Design House to design their second home in London. They came with a brief that was precise in its ambitions: refined, personal, and enduring. They wanted a space that would function as a living archive – where every object carried weight and every material had been chosen with accumulation in mind.

That brief shaped everything visible in the apartment. The London studio co-founded by Marie Soliman and Albin Berglund, organized the 4000 sqft listed residence around the logic of the collection rather than the logic of decoration. While decoration fills a space, a collection builds over time, and the objects in this apartment were selected for their capacity to mean more in twenty years than they do today.

Materials played a similar part. Take travertine, for example, which improves with use. The stone’s open pores collect light differently as surfaces wear, and the material’s inherent variation becomes more legible over years of contact. It is one of a small category of materials that rewards the passage of time rather than resisting it, and Bergman Design House built an entire apartment around this principle.

For the furnishings, Marcin Rusak’s bar cabinet – his practice suspends botanical matter, flowers and plant material, within resin – is an object whose surface contains a kind of preserved time. The three-dimensional wall installation by Swiss studio Beyond works through geometry and depth, holding attention across repeated encounters in a way that purely visual objects do not. Custom joinery by James Wellesley and stonework by Marco Pacitti connect the apartment to London’s specialist craft networks.

Bespoke plasters and natural marquetry cover the walls – both chosen, in Soliman’s framing, for tactile beauty and the ability to age gracefully. Fromental’s hand-painted wall coverings introduce a layer that only a human hand could produce, with the variation that comes from that process built into the surface from the start.